Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 17 April 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017 and the Influence of Social Media: Discussion

2:00 pm

Ms Niamh Sweeney:

I think I know. It came from an article in The Wall Street Journal which was not about the number of the data points appended to any one user's profile but it was about how advertiser's decide how they are going to target people. I think it is worth dwelling on that for just one second. When one is an advertiser advertising on Facebook, one does not know who it is one is targeting. It could be based on location, on gender or on some of the interests that we have created buckets for, but it is all aggregated and it is all anonymised. We know who a person is and that is why we will never sell a person's data, and that is a key point for us, but they do not. I think that is an important point. I know that it does not address all of the points made, but it is important.

Depending on how active one is on the platform I think would depend on how many data points one has. If one likes a lot of pages - if someone likes all one's pages - that would obviously constitute a data point in each case. One would never know my partner was on the platform, because he is a ghost. It really depends on how active a person is. I will hand back to Mr. Kaplan who was on a roll.